If you find Bhudda by the road, kill him.

The nihilists are at it again. They’re trying to
break the President’s health care reform package by staining the story, chipping the concept. And Puerto Ricans and Latinos, arguably the group that needs this legislation the most, are sitting on the hillside watching the battle rather than invading the battlefield.

“If we’re able to stop Obama at this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”, said Joe Demint, a Republican senator. What more motivation do we need? Is it that we’re so overwhelmed by the economic meltdown that we’re too tired to fight? Or is it that we silently beginning to believe the bullshit the medical industry is flinging at the vision. If you repeat a lie long enough…..

Republicans are defending the crazies coming to Obama rallies with guns. They’re claiming that the John Q citizens rallying against the President are genuine. Bullshit! Almost all these groups are being funded and organized by pharmaceuticals and private industry. Just imagine the national hysteria if brown and black people opposed to Bush’s policies showed up at his speeches with automatic weapons. They’d be arrested or mowed down.

When are Puerto Ricans and Latinos going to own their citizenship? It’s been paid for in blood since World War I. Either we develop a national voice and a global perspective on everything from Afghanistan to Cuba, from the travails of sub-Saharan Africa to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or we shut up and stop complaining about how the planet is going down the tubes.

Who is standing up for Obama? Latinos voted for him in overwhelming numbers forgetting that the struggle is not the revolution. The revolution is in changing institutional policies, in creating new institutions, in changing minds over a period of time. The enemies of progress, the dream killers know this which is why they’re looking to stop the health and educational vision the president has for this nation going as far as saying he’s attempting to indoctrinate their children by telling them to stay in school, do their best and stop making excuses based on race, class or dysfunction. Their criticism of the Administration’s health policies is to call it creeping socialism rather than simple reformation of an irreparably broken system that denies 50 million Americans health care insurance. If you discredit the dreamer, you kill the dream. And when they couldn’t discredit the dreamer, the visionaries, they killed them, King, Malcolm, the Kennedy’s, Albizu, Maceo, L’Overture. Eventually, the dream comes to pass, but, the dream-killers make it harder for future generations to dare to struggle, to even conceive of winning which is why defending and supporting the first Black president in the history of the United States is so crucial. Dare to struggle, dare to win: remember those sixties slogans?

The two factors that will save America are imbedded in the history of black and brown people; faith and family. These are not white, right wing concepts. Latinos have centered their existence on family and have kept it going for the last 500 years of colonialism, slavery and wholesale slaughter of their indigenous grandparents. Black people would not have survived the Middle Passage or slavery without faith. As a people, we have done faith and family without resorting to backward thinking or facistic behavior. We need to employ those qualities to continue the battle for a better life for our children and theirs. And that includes whites. But, this moment demands that we stand up to these bullies who think we’ve shot our load with the presidential campaigns and shout clearly: back the hell up. This child you will not intimidate or cause to stumble. You’ve had your way with America for the last 40 years and you blew it. You invaded countries, drained the treasury, polluted our landscape, de-regulated industries and killed thousands of American boys and girls for greed and god and glory. It’s our turn
.And while this child is a wonderful visionary, gifted and talented who believes in bi-partisanship and
love(we taught him not to hate), we, the veterans of the sixties, know what you’re capable of. When you see real change, when you perceive loss of money or power, you go rabid, start foaming at the mouth and acting crazy and shit. We know your game. And you know salt from pepper. Get real and back the hell up.
Puerto Ricans need to say this to these ultra-childish conservatives with child-like innocence and with adult follow-through and determination. It’s our time and we must seize it and leave the legacy of health and hope we promised ourselves and our children 40 years ago. This is not the time for nostalgia, but, rather the time to face these killers of the dream and the dreamers and tell them,”Enough with your lies and bullshit. Back up, back off and back down. You won’t win, you can’t win and we’ve already put our money and the lives of countless warriors and visionaries to see this guy in this office in this moment. We will win without a doubt, ‘ya understand. Now…where you wanna take this?